Messina kick off Meeting

The kick off meeting of the EU-MADE4LL project was held in Messina on November 24-25, 2016. The University of Messina is the main applicant for the project and the kick off was organized to officially launch all the activities. All partners attended the meeting, including Prof. Carmen D. Maier, who attended online all the sessions. At the introductory session, prof. Maria Grazia Sindoni, project coordinator, reported on the Erasmus + Key Action 2 “Strategic Partnership for Higher Education” general kick off meeting held in Rome, October 25, 2016 with the project manager Dr. Francesca Pollicino from Unime International Relations Office.
The agenda was full of important topics that the partners were eager to discuss, including a briefing presenting the project’s general agenda and detailed illustration of the three intellectual outputs, namely 1) the development of an online e-teaching and e-learning collaborative platform that will be developed by the Hannover research unit directed by Dr. Ivana Marenzi in Year 1; 2) the set-up of an international joint syllabus on multimodality and digital literacy which will be taught in Year 2 in Messina, Leeds, Florence, Aarhus and Rome; 3) the creation of the Common European Framework for Digital Literacy based on the descriptors used for the Common European Framework for Languages in Year 3.
After each partner presented their research/operative units, a range of other topics were debated in the two-day transnational meeting, to lay the foundations for the development of the joint syllabus (IO2), in particular discussing critical issues such as the development of ad hoc baseline surveys to be submitted to all students participating in the project so as to produce data, useful to compare with the project’s final results. It is crucial to have measurable data from the beginning to the end of the project to understand students’ progress and improvement in their critical skills in digital literacy. The teachers/researchers also started discussing the common readings for all students participating in the project and the calendarization of the numerous mobilities in Year 2 that will involve 5 teachers/researchers in 5 different Universities (i.e. Aarhus, Florence, Leeds, Messina, Rome) for a total of 28 days for each teacher/researcher (140 days for the whole joint syllabus).
On November 25th, all partners discussed the main functionalities that the EU-MADE4LL platform will have, with particular reference on how to pair students from different Universities, as one of the main tenets of the project is experimentation on peer-assessment. The discussion with the IT research unit was very productive.
At the kick off meeting, the partner from the job market was introduced, namely Marc Rocca, managing Director of Rocca Creative Thinking, a leading creative consultancy in the field of digital media and communication worldwide (www.roccacreative.co.uk)